Systems are well known for sending medical related images, such as X-rays, ultrasound, computerized tomography (CT), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), EKG, etc., over phone lines and standard television communication systems. These existing medical communications systems, however, suffer from a number of disadvantages, including high costs, immobility, inaccuracy, and slow transmission communication.
The cost of sending high resolution images over phone lines is expensive due to the high costs associated with operating a phone link system. Slow transmission rates over the phone lines (9600 baud rate maximum) further causes phone charges to accumulate over time. Also, digitized images sent over phone lines must be encoded with extra parity bits to insure against errors caused by noise (20 db signal to noise ratio) during transmission. Analysis of the extra bits causes further delay in transmission. Often, errors are not detected and the images are sent with the inaccuracies anyway. In these situations doctors are left with evaluating images that have inaccuracies. Thus, the analysis provided by the doctor is inadequate due to the inaccuracies of the image. Furthermore, phone link systems cannot easily provide communication with mobile units. It is desirable to have mobile units capable of developing medical photographs and capable of sending the photographs from any location to a central headquarters, where these images can be diagnosed by a professional. However, phone link systems are constrained in that not all locations can provide the proper phone line hookups for sending the medical images to the central headquarters.
Mobile television communication systems are also used to send images from mobile units to central locations, however, these systems are very expensive to operate. Particularly, in situations where the mobile units are at large distances from the central headquarters, requiring expensive television type satellite communications equipment to complete the transmission. These systems are expensive because they transmit non-static type images over highly used band widths, at high frequencies. The higher the frequency, and the greater the band width, the more it usually costs to transmit by satellite.
Due to the high costs and the problems associated with transmitting images over phone lines and/or standard television communications equipment, incorporation of mobile medical diagnostic equipment, with the capability of sending video images back to a central headquarters for analysis, has not been developed.